What are lies? To lie is ‘to make a false statement with the intention to deceive’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but this might not go far enough.

Can you lie with true statements? There is a famous story about St. Athanasius, who, fleeing in disguise, was asked by his pursuers, ‘Have you seen the bishop?’ His canny but truthful response: ‘Continue: he is not far from here.’

Can you lie without statements? Suppose someone asks, ‘Have the officers stopped taking bribes?’ The speaker lies, not by stating something, but by presupposing something, i.e. that the officers have been taking bribes. Suppose a newspaper says, ‘Asylum seekers are barbecuing the Queen’s swans’. They don’t say how many asylum seekers. Some? Many? All? But it conveys a stereotype—they do that sort of thing – which is false, insulting and oppressive. (It also happened to be a straight-out lie, given that no ‘asylum seeker’ had barbecued any swan.) Sometimes you can lie, not just with what you say, but also with what you don’t say, and with what you convey through the back-door.